In the electronics and opto-electronics industries, there are many products (such as sensors and fiber optic components of medical and other devices) in which transparent objects of various shapes, e.g., spheres, are used as lenticular articles in order to transmit or reflect light rays and at the same time to produce a convergent or divergent effect on the light rays that are transmitted or reflected. Such lenticular articles (also referred to hereinafter as "lenses") are typically comprised of glass, plastic, or crystalline substrate materials, and often a thin film optical coating must be applied to the substrate in order to enhance or vary the transmissive or reflective properties of these lenses in particular desired ways. Such thin film coatings usually constitute dielectric and/or metallic materials, and they are conventionally applied to the lens substrate in one or more layers.
Both high temperature and low temperature processes for applying thin film optical coatings to glass and to other lenticular substrate materials are known in the art. However, for some substrates it is also known that the low temperature coating processes are not as efficient as those which utilize high temperatures, and accordingly, for those substrates the latter processes are generally preferred. Yet the prior art has not dealt, at least not in a satisfactory way, with the need to releasably immobilize the lenses while they are being subjected to the fluctuations in temperature that result when a thin film coating is applied using a high temperature coating process. Moreover, regardless of whether a high temperature coating process or a low temperature coating process is used, the prior art has failed to address the need to releasably immobilize the lenses, both during the coating process and thereafter, especially when such lenses cannot be manipulated easily by hand (due to their size and/or shape) and also when they must be coated on more than one side, thus requiring that they be subjected to multiple applications of the coating process.
It is therefore the principal object of the present invention to provide an apparatus for releasably retaining one or more lenses in a fixed orientation while a thin film coating is being applied, thereby overcoming the disadvantages of the prior art.